F-Bomb

by Lauren McKeon

  It occurred to me that night, and not for the first time, that for all its dedication to equality, feminism suffered from institutionalized exclusion, and it wasn’t doing much for its bad image, not to mention the women who felt abandoned. This wasn’t a case of respectfully arguing over what direction battleship Feminism should steer, or what issues it should focus its missiles on. A war was brewing within the movement, between women who believed feminism already included everyone it needed and those who knew it did not. No wonder the anti-feminists were gaining traction: we were handing out ammunition like free candy and helpfully showing them where to point the gun.

  In October 2014, with the shaky state of feminism heavy on my mind, I went to the Women’s Forum des Femmes, held in Canada’s capital city of Ottawa. More than one hundred women of all ages filled an auditorium with laughter and hisses, cheers and boos. My thoughts were on the recent criticism of the movement, its discord, and the high stakes of it all: our lives. As feminism publicly crumbled, and the undercurrents of anti-feminism spilled over, we were already losing ground at home, at school, at work, on the streets, and in our bedrooms, courtrooms, and boardrooms.

  Then in its third year, the forum had set itself a bold goal: it would define the feminist agenda, for today and for the coming years. “We can, and we must, do this,” boomed Niki Ashton, a New Democratic Party member of parliament in her early thirties. “Canada is waiting.” A feminist agenda for whom, I wondered. Should there be only one? Can there be only one? I remember this as the time when I stopped avoiding the question: If we wanted to bring women back to feminism, did we need to overhaul the movement? I wasn’t alone. In the opening panel discussion, one of the speakers, Sonia Lawrence, director of the Toronto-based Institute for Feminist Legal Studies at Osgoode Hall Law School, described herself as a “critical race feminist.” She urged us to be “generous across our differences.” To a background of tentative cheers, she went on, “We need to keep the movement open and inclusive so that our disagreements do not overwhelm the many things we do agree on.” As the audience’s clapping became more confident, she added, “I am not the feminist police, and I don’t want to be.” Later, she remarked that the demonization and polarization sweeping the movement surprised and disappointed her. “We have to find a way to talk about the things we disagree on and pursue those,” she said. “It’s not clear what we have to gain from this divisiveness; it is clear what we have to lose.” She suggested the movement adopt flexible coalitions within itself: hundreds of groups with different key goals that could still work together to lobby for the big goals.

  After her speech, I wanted to hoot and holler like I was at a riot grrrl concert, not the National Library of Canada. My enthusiasm was short-lived. During the question-and-answer period, a woman in the audience asked how we could stop all the feminist-on-feminist hate she was seeing on social media, especially Twitter. “It’s vicious. It’s extremely discouraging and confusing,” she said. “How do we build a space where we don’t slip into attacks publicly?” The problem with such attacks, she argued, is that in addition to creating disunity, they perpetuated all the worst stereotypes about feminism. Women are turned off from the movement, and anti-feminist groups, sensing a wounded lion, take advantage of its weakness.

  One of the other panelists, Erica Violet Lee, a twenty-three-year-old Indigenous protestor who, minutes earlier, had received a standing ovation after reading her rallying cry, “We are the Revolution,” told the women gathered that she’d had to quit Twitter for just that reason. She couldn’t take the hate. Sonia Lawrence quickly jumped in. “By no means did I want to suggest we should be quiet in the name of unity,” she said. “Feminists should not,” she noted, “fear to discipline each other, particularly if a mainstream feminist is out of line.” In a way, I agreed: for far too long, women have been taught to play nice and be polite. Historically, the feminist movement has hushed many women’s voices under a misguided pledge for unity. It needs to stop. Still, as I glanced at my social media feeds, my smile sagged. Peer discipline and call-out culture on Twitter often manifests as neither respectful yet firm nor as even correctively caring. What we largely get instead are vicious and unforgiving attacks. No wonder people like Lee were bowing out of the conversation. Though dissent isn’t inherently terrible, it’s hard to understate how much it is fracturing us. There are no easy answers: feminism’s vibrant acrimony is turning women away, and so is its demand that all women kowtow to one capital-F unified version. It’s lose-lose at a time when women’s rights need it to be win-win.

  I was thinking about all this as I walked back to the hotel, after the conference. The parliament buildings were old and gigantic and beautiful, a testament to nation building and legacy. But construction was everywhere. One building, larger than a city block, was almost entirely covered with an outer shell of scaffolding wrapped in white plastic. The entire thing looked like it was plopped inside a bag, except where wind had ripped makeshift windows. Roughly half of all the storefronts located in the city’s pedestrian-only area were in the midst of remodeling, flimsy plywood shelters doing a poor job of disguising the chaos. This being Canada, plenty of signs asked passersby to “Please excuse our mess.” Construction was in progress, but soon, said the signs, everything will be good again. It occurred to me that the feminist movement was a lot like these buildings: an old, mammoth institution, proud and important, but falling apart—and still trying to convince us there was nothing to see. All the while, its scaffolding was showing.

  The backlash against the women’s rights movement, in and of itself, is nothing especially new. Those with a vested interest in seeing the movement fail have always existed: yes, sometimes it was men, but it was also the religious right and conservative traditionalists. In 1991, when I was seven years old, journalist Susan Faludi published the Pulitzer Prize–winning book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. Faludi charted the rising 1980s anti-feminist movement and emergence of what she called the “New Right” woman. I imagine Faludi must look at much of what’s going on today with a serious case of déjà vu. In Backlash, she argued that male anti-feminists enlisted women to do the heavy lifting in the campaign against their own rights. Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, whom I like to think of as the first president of the female anti-feminist fan club, headed the Stop ERA campaign against the (still unratified) Equal Rights Amendment because she believed it would “take away the marvelous legal rights of a woman to be a full-time wife and mother in the house supported by her husband.” Economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett, who claimed to be a reformed feminist (thanks to Schlafly) and whose book A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women’s Liberation in America sparked a six-publisher bidding war, argued that feminism reviles motherhood. Faludi also introduced us to Camille Paglia, who was then rising to fame for dismissing date rape as feminist nonsense.

  On my bookshelf, I have the fifteenth-anniversary edition of Backlash, which includes a preface that wryly notes the latest wave of anti-feminists were right-wingers who said they were the true feminists. Faludi calls women like Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women and The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, a “sleeper cell of pod feminists” who have hijacked the feminist movement. Other potential pod members are Lucianne Goldberg and Jeannie Sakol, who co-founded the Pussycat League in 1970 to oppose the women’s lib movement and bring back “charm, chic and clinging gowns,” and Danielle Crittenden, author of What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman and founder of the magazine Women’s Quarterly, which ushered in “new”—ahem, anti-—feminism.

  This latest iteration of the anti-feminist backlash reminded me of a Glee mash-up song, only depressing (well, depending on how you feel about musicals). Maybe Britney Spears’s “Oops! . . . I Did It Again” meets Guns N’ Roses’s “Welcome to the Jungle.” The same rhetoric was re-emerging, only now it was wilder and, also, everywhere. Social media allo
ws the ideas underpinning both anti-feminism and post-feminism (the idea that we’re past the need for feminism) to spread and to connect, and the anti-feminist movement—and its many octopus arms—have grown beyond the usual suspects. This popularity makes a certain kind of sense. My fellow millennials and I are, quite literally, the daughters of the powerful anti-feminist wave Faludi wrote about in Backlash. But it’s not just my generation. This new pukey-face-emoji reaction to feminism may have historical roots, but it also has its contemporary reasons. I’ve never before seen such a blanket rejection of feminism from those who actually have a vested interest in seeing it achieve its goals. To me, these women are harder to explain away. I can’t credibly claim they are all misogynists, and too many of them are not traditional, right wing, or even remotely devout. I also can’t quite convince myself they are all under the big, fat, hairy thumb of men or are misguided, approval-seeking drips.

  Lest we think it is only Women of the Internet, let’s not forget the spate of celebrities who once rushed to distance themselves from the f-word: Sarah Jessica Parker, Demi Moore, Carrie Underwood, Susan Sarandon, Kelly Clarkson, Lady Gaga, Björk, and (until recently) Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, and Madonna. (Both Donald Trump and Beyoncé can likely take some credit for pushing female celebs to join Team Feminism—albeit for different reasons.) In June 2014, pop star Lana Del Rey infamously declared: “Feminism is just not an interesting concept.” Shailene Woodley, star of the blockbusters Divergent and The Fault in Our Stars (both based on wildly popular teen fiction) has said she’s not a feminist because, as she put it, “I love men, and I think the idea of ‘raise women to power, take the men away from the power’ is never going to work out because you need balance.”

  Most of these women are also outspoken advocates for empowerment, independence, and strength. And yet—and yet—they repeat the same strange rhetoric of many anti-feminists: they love men, believe in equal rights, but feel feminism limits and confines them. It reminded me of a game I used to play with my friends when I was a kid: Opposite Land. Everything we said, we meant the opposite. Yes became no, and green became red. Our shirts would go inside out or backward, and sometimes we’d do a Superman with our underwear. Often, we’d wait for a parent to enter the room before we started playing it, just so we could annoy them. Looking at pop culture, I was that annoyed parent all the time.

  The uproar became so great that in May 2013 the Washington Times gleefully announced: “Feminism may be dead.” It wasn’t just hot air. At the time, in a countrywide survey, more than half the US female population had declared itself “not feminist.” About 5 percent said they were actually “anti-feminist.” And, in a series of subsequent polls, women consistently said they felt there was nothing positive about the term “feminist.” A year later, one 2014 Economist/YouGov joint poll showed that more than 30 percent of women still said “no” to the f-word after being read the dictionary definition of feminism (“someone who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes”).

  A May 2014 Ipsos Reid survey of fifteen countries—including Canada and the US, but also places such as Sweden, Japan, and Argentina—put feminists on the majority side again, but just barely. Drastically less than half of the respondents said they “strongly” identified as feminists, leaving the pollster to conclude only one in six were “core” feminists: the type who’d be likely to engage in activism or talk rights at dinner parties.

  In Canada, for instance, only 17 percent of women said they strongly identified as feminist; in the US, the number sat at 20 percent. In all cases, those polled were then read a dictionary definition of feminism that stressed social, political, and economic equality. It made a negligible difference. The numbers only bumped up once the poll asked respondents if they believed in equal opportunities for men and women and that women should be treated equally to men in all areas based on their competence, not their gender. In Canada, 67 percent strongly agreed; in the US, only 63 percent. The average for all fifteen countries surveyed was just 60 percent. To find out the story behind the words, I contacted John Wright, a Canada-based executive with Ipsos whose job it was to turn the company’s raw data into meaningful narratives.

  “Words in and of themselves are absolutely critical and can become pejorative,” said Wright, his voice heavy with a Nicolas Cage drawl. Survey results can vary wildly based on the precision of the language used when crafting the questions, even when considering the small differences between terms such as “in favor,” “support,” and “acceptable.” Each suggests a different level of commitment—what we’re willing to accept as true to us. And some words, simply put, are loaded. This can result in survey respondents answering negatively to something with which they actually agree. Based on the polling, that’s what Wright, a man in his late fifties, thought had happened to the word “feminist.” It was like a tea bag steeped in water too long, gone sour from all the negative social connotations. Many women may want to avoid calling themselves feminists, Wright said, even if they agree with equal rights.

  The word “feminist” has a long history of debate, and some of those debates were so negative, he argued, that it could be time, at least for pollsters, to redefine the word, or use an entirely different term. He had a point, though I was torn between whether it made me relieved or angrier. Wright, however, may have thought I was confused, because he suddenly told me about his old phone, a Motorola Flip the size of two hands and something many of the younger, smartphone-tethered staff in his office have never seen. Wright keeps it at the back of his desk and whenever anyone in his office is so fixated on something they believe is right, he will whip out the old cell and point to the gawky antenna. He does it to remind his younger staff that things have not always been the way they are now, that sometimes something that seems forever ago, wasn’t.

  I wondered whether Wright meant that feminism as a unified movement was about as outdated as an old phone, or that thinking feminism was a good label was naive in the same way that believing all phones had always been smartphones was naive. Either way, it was bad. I am sure what he really wanted was for me to be optimistic that, at least for some women, ditching the f-word didn’t preclude them from believing in equal rights. But I don’t think avoiding the word helps women; it hushes our voices and makes it harder to act. When I asked Wright if he was arguing for future polls to not include the word “feminist,” he paused. He was silent for longer than I expected. “I think this is just new ground,” he finally said. “And we just have to think about it.” Some countries, he surmised, still had a great need for the word and all that it represents. He was mostly talking about countries in Asia that, in his mind, still needed the Germaine Greer–type definition of the movement. “This is their time for feminism,” he said.

  But, I wondered: Had our time really passed?

  Once I started seeing women (and men) embrace this hardline rejection of feminism, I couldn’t stop seeing it or its effects. I pictured it as a giant f-bomb that had exploded, leaving a nuclear-sized mushroom cloud filled with hypersexualization, scary new conservatism, mid-century values, and a new generation of women who were eager to ditch the feminist fight. Famous women who ardently rebuffed the label and the thousands of Women Against Feminism weren’t the cause of this change, though, or even the final outcome; they were a single symptom of a much wider cultural shift. Just one generation ago, asserting the existence of such a regression would have seemed silly, conservative, wishful thinking. Not today. Today, evidence all around us shows that women see feminism as a tool for their mothers’ and grandmothers’ apron pockets, but it is not for them.

  I would love for the women who believe we are in a post-feminist world to be right. I want nothing more than for all the women who have dedicated their lives to feminism to retire and sip piña coladas on a beach while women and girls everywhere enjoy the fruits of their labor: equal pay, lives free of violence, equal representation in positions of political power, absolute reproductive rights, haras
sment-free working environments, and about a bazillion other things. But I just don’t see that paradise yet.

  That’s not to say women haven’t made huge gains; they have, and thanks largely to feminism. In 1967, for example, only 11.7 percent of mothers were the family breadwinners, and just over 15 percent were co-breadwinners. This is according to the 2014 Shriver Report, a 415-page study on the state of women in North America completed by the Center for American Progress under the guiding fear women were on the brink of societal backslide. As of 2009, those numbers had jumped to 41 percent and 22.5 percent, respectively. In recent years, twice as many single women as single men were new home buyers. Globally, women control more than $20 trillion in spending. Also gone were the days when only men pursued post-secondary education; we now outnumber them in most programs. We keep making impressive gains in employment, too: back in the 1970s, scantly more than 15 percent of us were managers in the private sector. That number is now closer to 50. In the US, women-led businesses account for a staggering $3 trillion of the country’s GDP.

  We are also leading companies that, years ago, nobody would have ever thought we’d run. Sheryl Sandberg was at Facebook and Marissa Mayer at Yahoo. The CEO of General Motors was Mary Barra. Before her, in Canada, Maureen Kempston Darkes became the company’s first woman president. In grade four we had to write to a CEO for a school assignment. I wrote to Darkes, confessing I idolized her. I was the only one in the class who received a handwritten response, which I still have. My dad worked at GM and, to his credit, explained that the fact a woman was his big boss was special; it meant I could do something like that one day.